Will spent his upgrade point on the second rank of True Bond. There were no clear benefits as far as either him or Bee could tell—the link felt more or less the same as before. Maybe a little clearer, a little more vivid, or maybe that was just confirmation bias. It was disappointing, but the third one was supposed to be the big one, anyway. They just had to hold out another two levels for that.

Will felt reasonably confident that he would get there. He seemed to have gotten over his plateau and found a way to keep leveling. As long as he kept thinking big, pushing his talents, he could get it done.

And if the elixir he had made was an elixir of ability, that would solve the problem right off the bat. At least one end of it.

They had wrapped up the elixir and stowed it away safely with the other one, inside the lockbox they had pilfered from the bandit camp near Greensby.

They started up their journey for the tenth day. They had been making good time, so they’d probably reach the intersection with the southern road soon.

Despite all that had gone right, Will found himself in a dreadfully dark mood—mostly due to Mongrel’s epic fumble last night. It was not a good time for him to have suddenly found his moral compass.

How hard is it to bag a woman who’s already in love with you? What could he even have said to fuck things up that badly?

He didn’t ask. They’d barely spoken about it at all. Just kept moving. Mongrel was pretty banged up, though, so clearly he’d angered the demon something fierce.

Gug babbling non-stop about the ‘genius’ book he was writing did not help one bit. Will found himself walking in silence, jaw firmly clenched, simply trying his best to ignore everything going around him so he wouldn’t demoralize the group with an unproductive finger-pointing meltdown.

Bee sent calming thoughts. It helped a little.

Throughout the course of the day, he found the forest changing around them. It grew denser, with vines and brambles choking up the underbrush until it was impossible to see anything more than a few meters off the road on either side. A dense fog covered the earth and pooled in the hollows between tangled roots, obscuring the ground. There was something strange about it, though. The fog was normal when he looked at it straight on, but shifted in dizzying patterns at the edges of his vision.

The dirt path also grew narrower, which it certainly shouldn’t have. Thinner and thinner, down to the size of a game trail. Then it abruptly stopped right before a gnarled tree trunk.

Dead end.

How…?

“This isn’t right,” Will muttered, glaring up at the tree like it was to blame.

“Did we take the wrong path somehow?” Bee asked. “Sorry, I wasn’t paying that much attention to where we were going.”

Will shook his head. “We never left the road. I’m sure of it. There’s no way it just ends like this. It’s supposed to continue unbroken all the way to Stormfort.”

“Which means…?” Mongrel asked, sucking on a cigarette.

“It means there’s clearly some fuckery afoot. Monster or fellform, has to be.”

“Or maybe a certain holy spirit looking for vengeance,” Mongrel grumbled under his breath.

Will sighed. “Definitely not that.”

Probably.

More likely, it was the reason why the majestrix had told them to turn back.

Will was lost in thought, forehead resting against the tree, until he realized that Gug had gone suspiciously quiet. Turning back to face the group, he found that Gug wasn’t there at all.

“Where did the fucking troll go?” Will asked.

No one had an answer for him.

Mongrel sent out his chimps in all four directions to search, but they didn’t see much of anything, even from the treetops, and quickly got lost themselves. He was forced to recall them.

Everything was moving, shifting, pulsing. Even the trees seemed to be crowding around, reaching out for him when he wasn’t looking at them directly. Whenever he took a step, his stomach lurched with vertigo.

“All right,” Will said, making his way to the remainder of the group. “We can’t lose track of each other. We need to hold hands. No joking around, either—just do it.”

Will reached out to take Oatmeal’s hand.

But when he touched it, the young man dematerialized into a trail of drifting fog that slipped right through his fingers. When he looked up, the others were nothing but wisps of smoke, too.

Fuck.

Whatever it was they had caught the attention of, it already had them where it wanted.

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Will reached out to Bee in his head, tried to get anything out of her, but there was nothing. Just emptiness in the part of his brain where he had gotten accustomed to her residing.

When he looked around, there were only trees. The road they’d been following wasn’t even there anymore. He was walled in on every side, and the fog was encroaching on him, flowing around his knees.

Will forced himself to breathe, to take a moment and think the situation through.

It was bad. Really bad.

But maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as it looked.

He doubted that they had encountered a demon capable of manipulating reality. If it had a power like that, he would be dead already. That meant everything he saw was some form of mind trick. Whatever was hunting them did not have any confidence in taking them out as a group, so it was trying to split them up.

But illusions could be seen through, and they could be broken. Especially when you knew it was there.

If it’s an illusion, I shouldn’t try to go anywhere. It’ll just get me more turned around. I should stay put and focus on finding my bearings.

It might have been possible for him to craft a potion of truesight to easily pierce the illusion that way, but all his reagents were with Zero, so that was out of the question.

To start with, he pulsed Detect Life. It earned him nothing. It was all blank around him, except for the ambient background hum of the forest.

Out of luck on that front, he simply sat down on the ground. He trained all his senses on his surroundings, just taking it all in. Trying to spot the seams.

I’ve got to be patient.

Hopefully the others will manage on their own.

*****

Bee had been wandering around in the woods for a while now.

Everything looked all the same. One second, she had been walking with Will and the others. Then suddenly she turned around and they were all gone.

She couldn’t sense Will at all, even when she strained until her head hurt, and no one responded when she called out, the dense forest seeming to swallow and mute her voice.

There had to be something nasty lurking around, but nothing had even tried to kill her yet.

Maybe it’s trying to bore me to death.

To be fair, I think it’s working.

She kicked the nearest tree out of sheer frustration.

It vanished.

“Huh.”

She tried punching the tree next to it. A shower of powdery bark flew away from it, but the tree remained in place. She kept going with a third. That one vanished, too.

“Well, all right. If it works, it works.”

She kept on assaulting the nearby forestation with her feet and her fists, dispelling the illusion piece by piece through trial and error. With a hard stomp, she scattered the mist that crowded around her, clearing a circle of earth and revealing a thin trail that led up a shallow slope.

Aha, there we go.

Even fancy demon magic can’t outsmart good ol’ fisticuffs.

Bee followed the trail and barged through the empty mirages that tried to keep her fenced in. The further she walked, the clearer her mind became. After a while, she could even feel the buzz of Will’s thoughts in the back of her head, like a badly tuned radio frequency. Nothing clear enough to parse, and he wouldn’t respond to her mental calls, but she was obviously going in the right direction.

She continued up the shallow slope until she crested it. The trail ended at the edge of a large clearing; a circular, flat piece of ground encircled on all sides by a wall of old gray beeches.

At the center of the clearing stood an odd construction. She couldn’t quite call it a building, but it was clearly built with habitation in mind. It was a great heap of sticks and deadwood, like an enormous anthill, lashed together with vines and long strips of soft bark.

Posted around the clearing were numerous crude idols, bones and branches cobbled together on vertical poles into rough figures.

The ground was riddled with openings to little tunnels, putting her in mind of a rabbit warren except somewhat larger.

The fog had completely gone out of her head, and she could sense Will like normal again. He didn’t seem particularly agitated. Surprisingly calm, actually. He was in no worse pain than usual.

Guess he’s fine, then. Good.

She tried calling out to him again, but he still wasn’t answering, and didn’t give any kind of indication that he could hear her, either.

A head peeked out from one of the holes. Round, fuzzy with rust-colored fur, and set with huge green eyes. The thing blinked at her, then ducked back down again with a little yelp.

She heard indistinct whispering from in there, so clearly the little fellow had friends.

“Uh, hello!” she called out. “You guys friendly?”

Not that she held out much hope that they were, but she might just as well check.

More heads came up. Four, five, six of them. They watched her a long while, silent, big eyes narrowed.

“You don’t hurt me, I don’t hurt you,” Bee continued. “I’m not here to fuck with you guys or anything. I just want to get out of here.”

The tiny devils hopped out of their hidey holes. Followed by six more, then a dozen more, then a whole heap of them piling out all at once.

They were small, a meter tall or maybe even a little less. Roughly humanoid, standing on two feet with hands like a human, but their heads were disproportionately large compared to the rest of their bodies, and they gnashed long, needle-sharp teeth together in wide mouths that ran ear to ear.

Most of them were armed with stone tools, flint and granite. Knives, clubs, even little spears.

They might have been sort of cute if not for the murder in their eyes, as well as the fact that their fur was matted with old blood and smears of their own feces.

Utterly charming.

Glancing back, she saw that the trail that had led her to the clearing was now gone, and she was entirely walled in.

“Why am I getting the distinct feeling that I got duped?” Bee asked herself with a sigh.

She slipped on her brass knuckles and kicked off her shoes, settling into a loose, ready stance. “Well, since you little fuckers aren’t giving me any choice… I suppose I have to cut loose.”

Clearly they did not have anything pleasant in mind with those weapons.

Killing it is, then.

Bee had never fought a monster before—not counting a few potshots with a bow—let alone a whole horde of them. She wondered idly what she would think of it.

Forty gibbering vermin let out a cacophony of shrill war cries and launched themselves at her in a wave of fur and teeth, tripping over themselves and shoving each other in their fervor to reach her.